Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  “We’ve got to flank them,” he said. “Before they flank us.”

  “Works for me,” Dean agreed. “I go right, you go left. Harmon, you stay here and keep them firing at you.”

  “Sure,” Baird said. “I’ve lived plenty long enough anyway, right? Outlived my usefulness, haven’t I?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Dean replied, a sharp edge in his voice. “I just don’t think you’ll be as quick or quiet as we are.”

  “I’ve hunted these woods for more’n eighty years,” Baird argued. “Know every tree and twig. I think I can be as quiet as the next guy.”

  “Look, we’re wasting time,” Sam said. And the snow on the ground was seeping through his clothes, cold and uncomfortable. “Dean’s right, we have to be the ones to go. You keep your head down and shoot in their direction every once in a while. If you can take one of them out, it’ll help our chances.”

  He and Dean rose to crouches and took off in their respective directions. As he went, Sam could hear Baird mumbling, “Taking orders from a jasper young enough to be my great-grandson. Why, I remember…”

  Sam darted from the cover of the downed trunk to a bushy pine. From there he’d have to cross a relatively open space to the next tree substantial enough to offer protection. There were a few scraggly bushes in between, so he ran low, hoping they would shield him from view.

  They didn’t. A bullet whipped through the branches of one, six inches behind him. He threw himself down and belly-crawled the rest of the way to the next big fir.

  Stopping there, he peered through the trees, hoping to see where the men—or spirits, or whatever they were—hid. He knew they would be phasing in and out, but figured they probably couldn’t shoot unless they were in material form.

  Another volley sounded, and Sam saw muzzle flashes ahead and to his right, amid another rock outcropping. These shots seemed to be aimed at Baird’s position, and Baird had fired back—Sam saw his bullet chip the gray rock.

  He was pretty close, then. He hoped Dean was closing in on the far side of them. Getting the three assailants in a cross fire would be their best bet.

  Keeping his gaze glued to the rocks, he raced at a steady, uncomfortable crouch to another bushy pine, then darted toward a limestone boulder of his own. Hunkered behind it, he holstered the Glock again. He was almost in shotgun range, and his rock salt shells would do more of the kind of damage he needed done.

  Sam took a deep breath, preparing himself to charge the unworldly beings. Just before he did, though, in a moment of odd quiet, he heard someone sobbing quietly, close by. He couldn’t tell if it was someone injured or simply terrified, trying not to be overheard.

  Attack, or check the crying person?

  The last time he’d heard someone crying in the woods, it had been Juliet, the widow. He decided he should check fast. He didn’t want whoever it was trying to make a run for it and stumbling right into a firefight. He stepped carefully through the brush and around a tree, and he saw, curled into a ball with his face in the snow and his butt in the air, a small, terrified boy, his skinny shoulders spasming with each sob.

  “Hey,” Sam said softly. “You need to sit tight here for another couple of minutes and everything will be okay. All right?”

  The kid gave no indication of having heard him. If anything, his crying got louder.

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked. “Are you hurt?”

  This time, the kid moved. He raised his head from his arms. His face had been sliced open down the right side, hairline to chin. Snow rimed his eyebrows. Under them, big blue eyes met Sam’s gaze.

  “We’ll get you to a doctor right away,” Sam said. “Just—just stay put for a few more minutes.”

  The kid didn’t say anything, but he continued to unfold from his fetal position. He was maybe nine years old, Sam guessed. He looked like a poor kid, rural. Probably spent a lot of time in these woods.

  Sam wished he’d say something, because the murderous spirits never spoke, and—

  The kid jumped to his feet, a nasty, gleaming knife clutched in his little fist, and rushed at him.

  Is he real? Sam wondered. Having a breakdown of some kind, as a result of the injury? He hadn’t seen the kid flicker out. He didn’t want to be stabbed, but he also didn’t want to shoot an innocent boy.

  The boy closed the gap and sliced toward him. Sam dodged the cut, caught the kid’s arm. The boy did phase out then, leaving Sam with nothing but air in his grip. A moment later the boy reappeared, a couple of steps away, driving the knife blade toward Sam’s kidney.

  Sam spun around and lashed out with the shotgun’s butt. It connected with the kid’s jaw, snapping his head back. He still hadn’t made a sound other than breathing and crying—no vocalizations, anyway.

  But he came back for more. He didn’t lose his grip on the knife, and he lunged at Sam again. This time Sam lowered the sawed-off’s barrels and squeezed a trigger. The gun roared and rock salt shredded the little boy.

  A second later every trace of the kid was gone. Gunfire sounded behind Sam, by the big rocks. Dean, he guessed, had engaged the enemy—and he wasn’t there to back him up.

  Dean crouched behind a thick-trunked ponderosa pine. He wished now that he’d brought a decent hunting rifle, like a 30.06—or maybe a bazooka—instead of the shotgun. He hadn’t anticipated a full-on firefight, though, and anyway, it was rock salt that killed the spooks, not lead. If you didn’t count Baird’s dumdums, which he refused to do.

  Not that he minded. A good gunfight could be nearly as cathartic as a no-holds-barred brawl. At the moment, however, he was worried about Sam, who hadn’t shown up to carry his part of the fight.

  He wouldn’t be able to check on Sam until the bad guys were down. He swung the barrel of the Remington around the tree and fired a blast at the rocks, then ducked back again. He wished the spirits would say something—their preternatural silence was one of the creepiest things about them, and if they screamed or cried out, at least he’d know he’d hit something.

  With his back against the tree, he felt the impact of a bullet thunking into its trunk. Just one, though, not the two or three that had come before. He took that as a good sign. Counting to three, he pushed himself upright and swung around the other side of the tree, his head and the shotgun at a different height than before. This time he could see one of his opponents, a blond soldier with no hat on, lifting his Winchester ’73 to fire. Dean squeezed off another shot and waited around to see the spray of rock salt turn the soldier’s face into hamburger a moment before he vanished altogether.

  All clear, then? He ducked partway behind the tree and reloaded, watching the rocks as he did. Something moved there, a flash of blue serge. The older soldier, he thought, a captain, still hid among the rocks. If the soldier didn’t show himself soon, he would have to find a new position from which to shoot.

  And he had to hope that while he was moving, old man Baird didn’t mistake him for one of the bad guys.

  Dean was waiting, watching the rocks, reloaded shotgun at the ready, when he heard the rapid flutter of wings and a rush of air. He looked up just in time to see an eagle stooping toward him, talons extended, beak open in a soundless screech. He threw his left arm into the air to fend off the bird’s approach, but the eagle dug one clawed foot into the sleeve of his coat and pecked at his face. The bill, razor-sharp, bit into his cheek.

  “Damn it!” Dean cried, swatting at the thing with the shotgun. “Get off me, you freakin’ bag of feathers!”

  The beak shot toward him again, aiming for an eye this time. Dean spun around, dropped the shotgun and caught the beast by its legs, then hauled off and dashed its head against the pine tree trunk. The third time he hit it, the eagle’s left eye popped out of its socket and its skull fractured. Just when Dean was struck by the horrible certainty that this was a real bird, not some magical construct, it vanished from his grip, leaving his hand empty.

  He heard a gunshot—not directed at him, and not the crac
k of a Winchester, but the duller boom of the sawed-off—and snatched up his shotgun again. He had been in some strange fights, but this one was shaping up as among the oddest. At least it sounded like Sam was back in it.

  Risking a glance around the tree, he could still see the smallest bit of the soldier through a tiny gap in the rocks. No sign of Sam. If he fired from here, only a few grains of rock salt would likely pass through that gap. But the soldier could stick his gun barrel out at any time and have a reasonable shot at him.

  He had to get closer.

  He scanned the sky, hoping no more birds would swoop down on him. Seeing none—the gunfight had even scared off the real ravens, which seemed as common in these parts as pigeons in Chicago or New York—he ran at an ungainly crouch toward the rocks. Don’t shoot me, Harmon! he thought as he covered the space from his tree.

  When he was almost to the rocks, his foot plunged through the snow onto an old branch, which snapped with a resounding crack. At the same instant, though, the soldier fired a round into the distance. At Sam, maybe? The report from his rifle covered the sound of the branch breaking.

  Dean allowed himself a quick peek through the gap. The soldier was in there, aiming into the trees—they never had to reload, that he could tell—and Dean shoved the barrel of the Remington into the gap and pulled the trigger.

  When he looked again, through a cloud of gray smoke, the soldier was gone, the rock hideout empty.

  “Sam!”

  “I’m okay, Dean!” Sam shouted back. “What about you?”

  “I’m fine! It’s all clear! Get your ass over here!”

  The branches across the way parted and Sam came into view. His expression was grim, his cheeks pale despite the cold and the exertion. Whatever he’d been doing instead of engaging the enemies among the rocks, he hadn’t liked doing it.

  Dean touched the wound on his cheek, where blood leaked out from under a torn flap of skin. Makes two of us…

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “We are not postponing the opening,” Mayor Milner insisted. He had long since moved from simply raising his voice and was at the point of outright, window-rattling yelling. Red blotches rose in his cheeks and he kept tugging at the knot of his necktie as if it was cutting off circulation to his head.

  “Donald, you know I’ve done everything in my power to make sure we don’t have to,” Jim Beckett argued. He sat in a comfortable leather chair in the mayor’s office, which was decorated with Navajo and Hopi crafts and antiques—some of which, Beckett was pretty sure, had been acquired outside legal channels—and at the moment he wished he was pretty much anywhere else on the planet. “I just don’t know what else to do.”

  “You can’t get the National Guard here to help out? Have you tried the governor?”

  “You know we can’t call outside of town,” Beckett said. He’d been over all this with Milner already, but the man had reached a point where he no longer saw reality for what it was. He wanted things to be his way because he willed them so, and nobody could tell him it didn’t work that way. “And we can’t drive out, either. Trace died trying.”

  “So you’re telling me, what, that there’s some kind of magical barrier all around Cedar Wells? Funny, I could have sworn I saw a UPS truck drive by an hour ago. That must have come from somewhere.”

  “That’s right,” Beckett said. “We’ve intercepted the driver and told him he can’t leave town until further notice. He’s not happy about it, but he tried to call his dispatcher and couldn’t get through, so he’s on board with us for the time being.”

  Milner picked up a small clay pot, an artifact from the ancestral Puebloans, from the edge of his desk and turned it around in his hands. “So we’ll have to put up signs on the way into town warning people that if they come in, they won’t be able to leave again? Do you have any idea what that would do to our tourist business? Not to mention the shopping center’s sales?”

  “I think it’s unfair to let people come in not knowing about it,” Beckett said. “Warning them away might be bad for the town’s reputation, might even make us a laughingstock. But is that worse than letting people get trapped here and killed, when we could have kept them out?”

  “You know there’s no way to get the word out, right, Jim? The mall has been advertising today’s opening for weeks. Even if we could reach the local radio stations, they’d only be able to notify a fraction of the people who have seen ads and flyers and heard about it on radio and television. But since Cedar Wells doesn’t have its own radio station, apparently we can’t even inform that many. The best we could do would be to station officers on the roads and have them wave people off before they got too close.”

  He put the pot down angrily, scowling at it, at Beckett, at the world in general. “Have you ever heard anything so stupid? Can you even believe we’re having this conversation?”

  “I wish we weren’t, Donald.”

  “Did you try satellite phones? Shortwave radio?”

  “I’ve tried everything short of smoke signals, Donald.” He had considered those, but didn’t think he could count on anyone to read them. He’d even considered just lighting a huge fire and letting forest service firefighters come in to check it out. Finally, he’d decided against that, because chances were they would just get stuck, too.

  “Why couldn’t this have happened when Janie Jennings was mayor? I’d love to have seen her trying to deal with this sort of thing. She got off easy.”

  “Every forty years, Donald. It only lasts a few days, then it’s over. By Monday, probably, everything will be back to normal.”

  Milner tugged at his shirt collar. “By Monday? How many people will be dead by then? How many lives ruined? Will the mall ever be able to attract shoppers after something like this soured its opening?”

  “There’s no way to know any of those answers,” Beckett said. “And honestly, they’re not my first concern.”

  “Well, I’d like to know what the hell is your first concern then, Jim.”

  “Saving as many lives as I can. And so far the only way we know how to do that is to spot the killers before they reach their victims and kill them first.” He didn’t point out that they had to be killed with rock salt, of which there was a sudden shortage as more people got the word. Those Winchester boys had called to tell him, and he’d told his deputies, and before long every container of it in town seemed to be spoken for.

  “So either way, people are getting killed.”

  Beckett shook his head, astonished by the mayor’s ability to completely fail to understand the situation. “They’re not real people, Donald. They’re…I don’t know, ghosts or something. But they can kill and they can be killed.”

  Milner buried his ruddy face in his hands. His fingers were thick enough to be Ball Park franks. Beckett remembered the catch phrase and could barely suppress a hysterical giggle. They plump when you cook them!

  “Terrific,” Milner said from behind the fleshy cage. “You want to put up signs on the roads into town saying, ‘Closed on account of ghosts.’”

  “I don’t think we need to be that specific,” Beckett said. “In fact, maybe we could come up with a more plausible scenario. An outbreak of some kind, or a chemical spill. Something that would make people want to stay away, but that we could then announce was over, once we know the danger is past.”

  “If there are any of us left to make that announcement.”

  “That’s a given, Donald. And, unfortunately, it’s a real concern. We don’t know for sure how long it’ll last or if there’s any limit to the number of people they’ll go after.”

  “God, I wish one of them would kill me,” Milner said, lowering his hands. “Then this would be someone else’s disaster.”

  Don’t wish too loud, Beckett thought. It just might come true.

  Reunited with Sam and Harmon Baird, Dean took another look at the rock hidey-hole the spooks had used. No sign remained that anyone had been there—the snow was disturbed, but only by rock salt,
not by footprints or bodies.

  “I’m thinkin’ spirits, for sure,” he said. “Just not ones that are like any we’ve encountered before.” He touched his raw cheek again. “And I don’t like ’em messing with my manly good looks.”

  “Seems the likeliest bet,” Sam said. “Which still leaves us with the big questions of why and how do we stop them. Harmon, are you sure you can’t remember anything else about that ranch?”

  “Oh, I remember lots about it,” Baird said. “Just nothing that seems like it’s connected to the forty-year.”

  “Like what?” Dean pressed. “Anything might help, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first.”

  “Let’s get back to the car while we talk,” Sam suggested. “We need to keep an eye out for more of them, just in case.”

  The others agreed, so they started crunching through the snow, back toward the road. On the way, Baird talked. “It was called the Copper Bell Ranch,” he said. “Brand was the C Circle B. I think it had some other name before that, but that’s what it was when I was growin’ up there. Outside the ranch house there was a big copper bell made outta copper from the Orphan Mine, right there below the South Rim.”

  “In the national park?” Sam asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t know there were any mines inside the park.”

  “Not anymore. Used to be. They took copper outta the Orphan, then uranium.”

  “Grand Canyon National Radioactive Park,” Dean said with a dry chuckle. “I like it.”

  “Used to be,” Baird said again. “Miners’d come out after a shift and drink at the Bright Angel Lounge, right alongside the tourists. Some of ’em probably woulda set a Geiger counter to tickin’. Anyway, I don’t remember what the ranch was called before the folks who owned it when I grew up there took it over, or if it had always been the Copper Bell. But that mine didn’t get going until eighteen and ninety or thereabouts, and the ranch had been around at least forty years at that point.”